Problem: Sometimes projects don’t go through a visioning cycle. Rather, the client tells us what they want us to build, we make sure their needs are validated, and then we go off and build it. This, however, results in ThoughtWorkers who are not familiar with the product visioning process and why it is important to projects.
My Role: In March 2015, I was a part of an 18 person Product Visioning workshop led by Zichuan Xiong. Several months later, Zichuan approached me about leading the workshop myself, to harness my design and product knowledge and share it with ThoughtWorkers.
My role in the workshop required teaching the product visioning process and then facilitating a 3 hour workshop with 12 attendees of different backgrounds. The workshop covered defining a customer need and finding a product solution through the process of conducting research, creating a persona, defining design challenges (“How might we…”), creating an ad poster, and ending with a product pitch.
Key Takeaways:
How to find a balance
Product work is centered around finding a balance between the customer and the business. I found it interesting that while conveying the importance of finding a balance between the customer and the business, I too was finding a balance during the workshop. As a facilitator, I was continuously challenged to find various ways of guiding people’s thinking while also making sure that they were confident in coming up with original ideas. To some, particularly the designers, this wasn’t a problem, which resulted in making sure they did not take too much control of the group discussions. Conversely, it was pretty challenging to get back-end developers to imagine a persona and become comfortable with the creative work, which made their finished products an even bigger accomplishment.
How to explain content
Some graphs are definitely easier to explain than others. When it comes to product, the content tends to be a bit more abstract, making it a little difficult for people to grasp certain contexts. It was an interesting thought exercise to process each graph as a developer, business analyst, quality analyst, or designer, and talk to the points that were most salient for each discipline. For example, separating the above “solution” from “business model” for a developer required defining the “solution” as a feature set, whereas the “business model” as the business framework which the feature set would influence.
